What I soak up from the flow of information on the web. Shooting the breeze on the language of forms against the technology landscape. Discussing what matters in my little world!

September 25, 2006

Passion

A follow up on Hiring - some organizations will have the best process to select the candidates based on technical skills, only to realize fallouts on other fronts. One front that I believe we typically lack formal review during the interviews is how passionate is the interviewee. A candidate can be a good fit technically, but organizations like ours need go-getters, or people going beyond what they are asked to do. Problem solving questions will not help you much identify passion in your candidates, they will help you assess the raw talent/intelligence. Erik Sinkwrote a great essay along the same lines. In his equation I would replace the L(learning) variable for P(passion), which to me represent better the successful candidates at Macadamian. The calculus equation is now:

Initially our interview process must really assess G, but over time (t), the amount of P one has is more and more important, this is what the first derivative tells us. So assessing P is very important to finding good long term candidates for our oragnization.

How does one go about assessing Passion? A lot of it is in the unsaid, the reaction of a candidate to a question they can't answer, or one they got wrong, are they willing to dig more, fight it out - it's the job of the interviewer to dig, a wrong answer or no answer can tell you a lot about someone. Understanding how does one go about finding out what he/she doesn't know, and how bad they want it is where the questioning must be taking place. Doing full circle to my initial post on hiring - Bringing the candidate and your interviewer on the same playing field is key to find a good fit, whether it is talking about warcraft or monopoly!